Romance Linguistics
Deutsche Version: Romanische Sprachwissenschaft
The field of Romance linguistics encompasses the study of historical and modern Romance languages and their dialects, both as spoken and captured in media, particularly in written form. Scholars examine phonetic and grammatical structures, vocabulary and regularities in linguistic usage. Variations within individual Romance languages are also analysed and described from dialectological, sociolinguistic and variational linguistic perspectives. The Romance languages are perfectly suited for historical and comparative linguistic study thanks to a long history of their scholarly description, as well as an extensive body of extant texts from their older linguistic stages and their root language, Latin. The LMU is one of only few institutions that, in addition to French, Italian and Spanish, teaches and researches Portuguese and Romanian, as well as further Romance languages, such as Occitan and Sardinian, making it an excellent place to study and work in Romance linguistics. In addition, the LMU Munich offers a broad range of related studies from general linguistics to phonetics and speech processing, computational linguistics and the digital humanities, which provide myriad opportunities for scholarly cooperation and collaboration.